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We have been working with ICO for about 2 years to build out the in vehicle user interface for the satellite they launched late last summer. We built a new custom UI based on StreetDeck, integrated with their satellite modems, added data services and even implemented a program listings interface. We are a bit biased but this looks like it is going to blow away cruise cast with a small antenna, a great price point and an array of bi-directional data services all augmenting their 10-15 channels of high quality video.

We were ambushed by this companyís PR team in the central hall of CES 2009. We thought the last thing we need to do is talk about yet ANOHER iPod accessory. We saw the product again in the Sands show case and decide this was worthy of a story. It would be great to test one of these guys. Let us know if you have tried one.

It is amazing how small, cheap and low power computers are getting. The show floor was littered with them so we took a sample of one in this clip below. Running a quicktime MOV on the faster unit in this movie took up 60% of the CPU so some testing is probably in order. Over the last 12 years of working on computers I have seen tons of motherboards. Even some that are very expensive from big name companies can be riddled with driver problems or other small quirks.

The brutal trail to bringing a car computer to market is littered with casualties of failed products. We certainly have gotten run over a few times. Vizualogic's booth at SEMA was significantly scaled down. At CES this year, they have no booth and no published display suites. Audiovox is suing them for patent infringement. Anyone who is bringing a computing product to market better fasten their seat belt. It is a rough ride.

This product might actually have been around for a few years but we havenít seen people talk about it on our forums. We werenít able to make it up to their booth before the show closed, but there units are all hand made in Italy. If Audison reads this, we would love to borrow one for a few weeks to test it and compare it to the Focal Amp. We found a website showing a price of 3,000 Euro. As a non-audiophile, the big advantage I can see here over the focal unit is that this unit has 4 channels. If we can get both units in for testing it would be fun to do a side by side comparison.